The Crystal Variation

by Sharon Lee

  The cab was slowing. He glanced at the map before he recalled that it was off-line, then at the dramliza.

  Rool Tiazan opened his eyes and straightened in his seat, the rich color returning to his face.

  “We will be leaving the cab very shortly and joining my lady,” he said in his smooth voice.

  Jela felt Cantra’s fingers tighten on his knee, but she unexpectedly held her peace, leaving him to ask—

  “I thought we were returning to our ship?”

  “Indeed we are, M. Jela. But not directly to your ship, I think? Four people walking across the yard may—no, I must say, will be—unremarked. We have not the same assurance of anonymity, riding at leisure in a cab.” He paused, head tipped to one side.

  “If your wounds pain you, sir, my lady will be pleased to assist you.”

  He meant the arm, and the various other scratches from the late action, Jela thought, to keep the hairs that wanted to rise up on the back of his neck where they belonged.

  “Thank you for your concern,” he said politely. “They are hardly noticeable; I’ve fought long days of battle with worse and not faltered.”

  “Surely, surely.” The dramliza smiled and moved his slender hand, stroking the common air of the cab as if it were a live creature. “I meant no insult, sir. The prowess of the M Series is legend even among the sheriekas, whom we must thank for the original design.”

  The hairs did stand up then.

  “Explain that,” he said, and heard the snarl in his voice. Cantra’s fingers, still resting on his knee, tightened briefly, then relaxed.

  “Don’t tease him,” she told the dramliza in the lazy voice that meant mayhem wasn’t too far distant. “He’s had a trying day.”

  Rool Tiazan inclined his head in her direction, his face smooth and urbane.

  “Lady. It was not my intention to tease, but to inform.” He paused.

  “The prototype of the M Series,” he said, with, Jela thought, care, “was developed at the end of the last war by those who now call themselves sheriekas. The design was captured, modifications were made, and when the sheriekas returned to exercise their dominion over the Spiral Arm, the M Series was waiting to deny them the pleasure.”

  Jela grinned. “I hope they were surprised.”

  “By accounts, they were just that,” said Rool Tiazan. “They had abandoned the design as flawed, you see.” He smiled, as sudden and as feral as any soldier about to face an enemy.

  “Over and over,” he murmured, “they make the same error.”

  “The dramliz are flawed too, I take it,” Cantra said, still in her lazy, could-be-trouble voice.

  “The dramliz,” Rool Tiazan said softly, “are multiply flawed, as the sheriekas had no wish to create those with abilities sufficient unto the task of destroying sheriekas without—appropriate safeguards.”

  A chime sounded inside the compartment, and the sense of motion ceased entirely.

  “Ah! We are arrived!” Rool Tiazan moved a hand as the door began to lift.

  “Please, after you, Lady and Sir.”

  THEY WERE ON A narrow and sparsely populated street in the upper port. The show windows of the stores lining the blue cermacrete walkway were uniformly opaque, the sell-scents and light-banners quiet.

  “Ah, excellent,” Rool Tiazan murmured, as he stepped out of the cab. “Our timing holds.” Behind him, the cab’s door descended, the window darkened, and it sped off up the street.

  “Come,” the dramliza said, moving down the walk toward the cross-street “my lady awaits us.”

  They turned right at the corner, Rool Tiazan walking with something like a soldier’s proper stride, for all he looked so fragile. The few people they passed spared them no glance, though surely the three of them were a sight worth—

  Four of them, Jela corrected himself, catching the flutter of grey robes from the edge of his eye as a lady stepped from the doorway of a closed bookshop and fell in silently beside Rool Tiazan, placing her hand lightly on his arm.

  The lady was—diminutive, a fact that had not been readily noticeable in the alley. The top of her cropped red head barely reached her mate’s shoulder.

  Her gray robe was embroidered in gray thread. Jela squinted after the design—and found himself looking instead at the shop windows, the traffic, and the few pedestrians they passed.

  “Interesting robe,” Cantra murmured from beside him. “I wouldn’t look too close, though.”

  “I can’t look too close,” he complained, and heard her throaty chuckle.

  They came to another street, turned right and were abruptly in day port, the walk busy with people, the banners and signs in full attraction mode, the street filled with cabs and lorries and cargo carriers.

  And still no eyes turned their way, even in idle curiosity.

  “Invisibility has its uses,” Cantra muttered.

  “But we are not invisible, Lady Cantra.” Rool Tiazan’s voice drifted lightly over his shoulder to them. “We are merely—of no interest.”

  They crossed the busy mainway carefully, and were soon among the ships. Jela felt Cantra growing tense beside him.

  “Pilot?” He murmured.

  She sighed. “This visit really necessary?”

  “Yes,” he told her regretfully. “Pilot, it is.”

  “Right.”

  Dancer was coming up on the next row and Cantra stretched her legs to come even with Rool Tiazan.

  “I’m captain of yon ship,” she said. “It’s mine to go up first and open her.”

  “Of course,” he said with an inclination of his bright head.

  His lady lifted her hand from his arm and fell back beside Jela. He looked down into her sharp, solemn face.

  “The configuration carries the suggestion,” she said, answering the question he hadn’t asked.

  “So if we walked down the street four abreast, people would notice us?” he asked.

  “Not necessarily,” she replied. “But such a configuration might require Rool to somewhat exert his will, which might in turn catch the attention of those with whom we would rather not deal.”

  “The sheriekas are looking for you, then?”

  The lady turned her head away. “What do you suppose, M. Jela?”

  “That, if the sheriekas were hunting me, I’d think very hard about where I led them.”

  “We have thought—very hard,” she returned, giving him a haughty look from amber eyes. “We and those who are like us. The consensus is that, while success is not assured, we must nonetheless act. It is true that we may fail and all the galaxy—indeed, all the galaxies!—go down into the empty perfection of the sheriekas eternity. But if we do not try, we shall certainly embrace that doom.”

  They were at the base of Dancer’s ramp. Cantra went up, light-footed as always, Rool Tiazan pacing silently at her side.

  Jela would have waited a moment on the cermacrete, to avoid a crowd at the hatch, but his walking companion placed her tiny hand on his wounded arm and urged him forward.

  “I regret that you have taken hurt,” she murmured, as they moved up the ramp.

  “I’ve been wounded before,” he told her shortly, and was surprised by a stern glance from those amber eyes.

  “We have all of us been wounded, M. Jela. It is still possible to regret the occasion.”

  He bowed his head. “You’re correct, Lady. It was a rude reply.”

  “It is not the rudeness which is dangerous,” the lady said, as they hit the top of the ramp. “But the assumption that pain may be discounted.”

  Ahead of them, the hatch rose, and Cantra ducked inside, Rool Tiazan her faithful shadow. Jela and the lady followed them into the narrow lock, the hatch reversing itself the instant they stepped within.

  Cantra turned away from the control panel, waited until the hatch was sealed, then slithered past the crushed three of them to lead the way down the corridor to the piloting chamber.

  Rool Tiazan extended a hand and his lady moved forward
to take it. So linked, they followed Cantra.

  Jela took a step—and paused, lifting his wounded arm. It felt—odd. He snapped the seal on the dressing Cantra had so painstakingly applied, pulled it off—

  The wound had been—non-trivial. He’d done what he could, and Cantra had done what she’d been able. Still, it would have—should have—taken time and a medic’s care to fully heal.

  And now—there was no wound, no sign that he’d been wounded. His tough brown hide didn’t even show a scar.

  Neck hairs prickling, he threw the dressing into the recycler and moved after the others.

  The corridor was dim with emergency lighting, the doors along it dogged to red. Cantra hadn’t wasted her few seconds with the control panel, Jela thought, and approved.

  The door to the piloting chamber was dogged, too. Cantra placed her fingers on a certain spot along the frame and the door opened.

  Inside, it was no brighter than the corridor, the board a blot of darkness along the far wall. Taking no chances, was Cantra yos’Phelium, canny woman that she was.

  At the far end of the room, in the corner formed by the end of the co-pilot’s board and the curve of the interior wall, leaves glowing in the light from the emergency dim above it, was the tree.

  Cantra walked to the pilot’s station and stood, tense but calm, her hand on the back of the chair. Rool Tiazan and his lady, however, had stopped only three steps into the room, and stood as if caught in an immobilizer beam.

  Jela moved to one side, so he stood between them and the tree without obscuring their view of each other. After all, it was the tree he had wanted them to see; the tree who should make the judgment, here. The tree—

  Its branches were moving slightly, though the blowers were off, and the whole tower was suddenly filled with the aroma of fresh seed-pod.

  “Ah,” Rool Tiazan’s lady breathed, and glided forward on silent gray slippers. Her mate went after her, one respectful step behind.

  Though this was the meeting he had wanted, Jela twitched, suddenly not sure he wanted these . . . sheriekas-made in position to damage—

  Two steps from the pot itself, the lady sank to her knees on the decking, gray robes pooling about her, head down, tiny hands upraised, as if in supplication—or prayer.

  Rool Tiazan, a step behind, went gracefully to one knee, and bent his head.

  The tree . . .

  There was a tumble of images in Jela’s head—of a world seen by dragon-eye, the crowns of trees so thick that the sea was barely visible as a glint in the pale light of the star. Sounds filled his ears—water rushing, waves crashing, rain striking the earth, and the wind, moving through countless millions of leaves . . .

  The dragon-eye blinked, and the wind shifted—became dry and pitiless, scouring rock, stirring the dust in the dead sea-bed, moving the sand in long waves, burying the skeletons of trees were they lay . . .

  Jela’s eyes filled with tears. He blinked them away, shot a glance at Cantra, standing with her slim shoulders bowed, her hair shielding her down turned face.

  Before the tree, the lady raised up her head.

  “We were not the agents, but we accept the guilt. We have committed crimes against life, actions so terrible that there can be no forgiveness.

  “Have pity on us, who had none. Allow us to make amends. We pledge ourselves to you; we give you our lives—use them or end them. It is with you.”

  A blast of hot wind rocked the inside of Jela’s head. He saw the young dragons, tumbling into the air, rolling on the soft, dry leaves at the base of a stupendous tree—and pushing out of the sheltering deadfall, hopeful new leaves on a tender trunk . . .

  “Yes,” Rool Tiazan’s voice was ragged. “We have children and they are kept as safely as any may be. End us now and they will end with all else, when the sheriekas have had their way.” He drew a hard breath.

  “I have lain down my shields; you may do what you will. It will be necessary to end me first, for I may not allow harm to befall my lady.”

  Another breeze, this one scented with the hint of rain.

  At the pilot’s station, Cantra suddenly straightened and shook her hair out of her face.

  “My opinion, is it?” she said, and laughed on a wild note Jela had never heard from her before. “I don’t have one. Best I can bring you is something Garen used to say, that made more sense than most.” She took a breath and closed her eyes, reciting in a voice a bit deeper and a fair amount slower than her normal way of speaking:

  “In the matter of allies, you need to ask yourself two things: Can they shoot? And will they aim at your enemy?”

  She opened her eyes and nodded at the tree. “That’s my opinion, since you asked for it.”

  There was a stillness in the chamber, and among the leaves of the tree. The air grew warm, which was just, Jela thought, that the blowers weren’t on . . . The dramliz didn’t stir from their attitudes of supplication, save that the lady lowered her hands and folded them against her robe.

  Then, as if the threat of storm had passed off, the air freshened, the top-most branches of the tree moved, and Jela, prompted by an impulse not his own, walked forward, the aroma of tree-fruit in his nose.

  He slipped past the kneeling dramliz, and held his hand out under the branches. Two seed-pods dropped into his wide palm; he began to close his fingers—and two more dropped, attached by a branch no thicker than a thread.

  Well.

  Turning, he touched Rool Tiazan lightly on the shoulder, and when the man looked up handed him the two attached pods. Passing on, he gave one of the remaining two to Cantra and stood by her, his own fruit cupped in his palm.

  Across the field of his mind’s eye a dragon swept by, hovering on effortless wings above the crown of an enormous tree. As he watched, the dragon lowered its mighty head, and a branch lifted to meet it. The dragon selected a pod, swallowed it . . .

  The image faded.

  At the base of the tree, Rool Tiazan broke one pod off the tiny branch, and handed the second to his lady.

  “I, first,” he murmured, and held the fruit high in his palm, where it fell into sections, releasing its aroma into the chamber.

  He ate without hesitation, as a man might savor a favorite treat, and as if no suspicion—or hope—of poison clouded his heart.

  His lady waited with bowed head for three heartbeats, then ate her own fruit, neatly.

  “Us, now?” Cantra asked.

  “It seems so,” he answered.

  “Right.” She ate, and he did, and he closed his eyes.

  Overhead, he heard the sound of dragon wings.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Spiral Dance

  Gimlins

  THE GRAY-ROBED LADY was in the jump-seat, Rool Tiazan standing behind her like a paladin, or a servant.

  Cantra lounged at her ease, arms folded on the back of the pilot’s chair, keeping her expression pleasantly neutral. She hadn’t offered the ship’s guests tea or other refreshment, which was her call as captain. If either noticed the lack, they didn’t mention it.

  Jela was in the co-pilot’s chair, on his mettle and letting it show, face hard, eyes hooded. Having second thoughts about accepting the decision of a vegetable in the matter of allies, Cantra guessed, and carefully didn’t think about her moment of contact with that same vegetable, its question as clear as if it had whispered in her ear.

  “The sheriekas,” Jela said, breaking the longish silence. “According to Ser Tiazan, they can’t be defeated, but they can be escaped. I’d like to hear more about that particular assertion, such as how the escape plan is configured, and what exactly you expect from your allies.”

  “Ah.” That was the lady, sitting straight-backed and prim, gray slippered feet swinging some inches above the decking, her hands folded in her gray lap.

  “Perhaps we ought better to have said that it is the fervent hope of many of the dramliz that the sheriekas may be escaped. We who have refused to serve are numerous, and varied, and not entire
ly of one mind.”

  Jela frowned. “There’s no plan, then,” he said, flatly.

  The lady raised a tiny, ringless hand.

  “There are several plans, Wingleader Jela. There is, for an instance, the plan formulated by our esteemed colleague Lute and his dominant. They—”

  “Hold it,” Jela was frowning hard now. “Explain dominant.”

  The lady sighed sharply, and it was Rool Tiazan who answered.

  “Lady Cantra had previously raised the question of the flaws which insure that the dramliz pose no threat to their makers,” he said, as calmly as if they were discussing the possibilities of a proposed trading route. “Each dramliza is composed of two units. While each unit is possessed of those odd talents which the sheriekas find good, there is a selected-for disparity between them.

  “The dominant unit’s talents are the lesser—” He inclined his head to Jela. “You understand, sir, that we speak in relative terms of value.”

  “Right,” said Jela.

  “Yes,” murmured Rool Tiazan. “So, the dominant unit holds the lesser powers, except that she may command and direct the subordinate unit and he may not withhold himself. The subordinate is also required to defend the dominant with his life.”

  “Must make for an interesting situation,” Cantra commented, “if they ever wanted to shut one of you down.”

  The vivid blue gaze came to rest on her face and he inclined his head.

  “Indeed. The dominant carries the seeds of her annihilation within her. When the sheriekas wish to terminate a dramliza, they merely trigger the implanted doom, and the dominant expires. Unable to regulate himself, the subordinate soon follows, unless speedily paired with another dominant.”

  “Nasty,” Cantra said, and meant it. She looked directly at the lady. “So, why’re you still walking, if it can be told? From what Jela tells me, I don’t expect the Enemy likes deserters none.”

  The lady smiled tightly.

  “This pairing is a—miscalculation, Pilot. When we realized the extent and kind of our abilities, we used them to liberate as many of our kind as possible. However, the sheriekas have other means of disposal at their beck, and time grows short—” she sent a swift glance to Jela— “for all.”